Today was excruciating. Our first 7 hours we managed to travel all of about 4 miles. TONS of snow. Major route finding difficulties. Talus scrambling. Frozen lakes. I suffered flashbacks to guiding on Mt Rainier and tried climbing straight over a pass before taking a bearing. I really didn't expect to find much snow at 3500-4000' in the cascades in late June, but oh boy is it there. The only tracks I saw today were from snowshoers, maybe a week old. At least we managed to find a nice campsite for the night.
Our morning started out wonderful, good breakfast, high spirits, sunshine....what could go wrong, right? Well a whole lot of things, SNOW. I learned quickly about snow travel in tennis
shoes. Falling hurts, the bruise from slamming into a log on my leg still smarts. The route finding took valuable time and energy, in the end though we saw many sights we may not have seen because we found our own way. The frozen lake (Tinkham Lakes) were actually 200' above our actual trail, a gem we would have missed. It was interesting day, spent in snow and then in extremely hot clear cut. I can not decide which one I don't like more. Soon we will be out of clear cutting though and I will look forward to that!
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